The shocking true story behind how Qatar secured the 2022 World Cup and why FIFA agreed to it When FIFA awarded the tiny desert state of Qatar the rights to host the 2022 World Cup, the news was greeted with disbelief and allegations of corruption. How had a country with almost no football infrastructure or tradition, a high terror risk and searing summer temperatures of 50C beaten more established countries with stronger bids? The story behind the Qatari success soon devel-oped into one of the greatest sporting scandals of our time. And when the Sunday Times Insight team received a cache of hundreds of mil-lions of documents from a whistleblower, the contents of the FIFA Files be-came a global sensation, unearthing the corruption that lay at the heart of the bidding process. Now in this remarkable new book by the Sunday Times journalists at the cen-tre of the investigation, Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, comes the most comprehensive account yet of what happened and who was involved. Above all, it explains why, despite all the evidence, FIFA under Sepp Blatter continues to support Qatar - even to the extent of publishing an edited and abbreviated re-port into the process that was immediately denounced by its original author. Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, The Ugly Game is un-doubtedly the biggest sporting story of our times.

About the Author

Heidi Blake is a multi-award-winning investigative journalist. She was assistant editor of the Sunday Times, attached to the Insight team, un-til spring 2015 when she became BuzzFeed's UK investigations editor.